Eighteen Editions of the Weihai Show. We Have Been There Since the First One.

Lures are still the centre of it. Spoons, jigs, soft baits and trolling lures, in the colours our buyers actually sell rather than the colours that look good on a screen. The Iwashi and Swift float ranges travel with us too, alongside assembled hook and swivel rigs and loose terminal tackle by gauge and finish.

The second wall carries rods, reels, lines, floats, nets, pliers, tackle boxes and ice fishing gear. If you buy in mixed containers, this is where you can compare finish across a whole category in one walk.

At the end of the stand we put the IronFin inflatable paddle boards and kayaks. They come from the same group as the tackle side, and they have been the fastest growing part of our export mix over the last two seasons.

• 2008 First edition runs October 9 to 11, the first fully market-run professional exhibition in Weihai. We book a stand.
• 2017 The expo is named one of the first Shandong provincial brand exhibitions.
• 2023 The 15th edition moves to the Weihai International Economic and Trade Exchange Center. The show gets much bigger, and the aisles get longer.
• 2025 The 17th edition passes 70,000 sqm with more than 1,100 exhibitors, the largest fishing tackle export show in the country.
• 2026 Number eighteen. Same city, same three days, same wall of samples.

Buyers arrive with a list. The ones who place an order are almost never the ones who take the most brochures. They are the ones who pick a lure off the wall, turn it over, check the hook gauge and the paint edge, and then ask what the carton costs. So we stopped printing long catalogues for the stand and started bringing more sample stock instead.

A show floor is a bad place to judge how a lure swims. Nobody can tell you that on a Saturday afternoon in a hall with 1,000 exhibitors and a bad ceiling. If a spoon or a jig looks right in your hand, the next step is a sample in your own water, not another conversation at the stand.

Three days is also not enough time to open a new mould. If you want a new head shape, a new colour run or a private-label carton, bring the drawings and the target price with you. Otherwise we end up exchanging emails for a month, which is fine, but it means the show did less for you than it could have.

Send us your enquiry list before September 19 and we will have the samples pulled and waiting, which saves you the walk between halls. Tell us the categories, the target prices and the volumes you move in a year, and we will tell you straight away which lines fit and which ones do not.

If you cannot make it this year, we will post photos and short notes from each day on the exhibition news page. Catalogues are on the download page. Either way, email reaches us faster than a show floor does.